52 Of The Best J.K. Rowling Quotes Ever

“Any writer finishing a book will know what I mean when I say, you’ve lived a parallel existence and suddenly the door closes and it’s over. For me it was 17 years. I was writingHarry Potter the night my mother died. It was a connection to a very different time in my life. It had always been there for me to escape into during the most turbulent years of my life.” (Today)

“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.”

“Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.”

“Curiosity is not a sin…. But we should exercise caution with our curiosity… yes, indeed.”

“I had been writing for years, intending to write for adults, but had never tried to get anything published before. But when this story came to me it was obviously a children’s story. So, it chose me, rather than the other way around. I never sat down and said, ‘I’m going to write for children.’” (STV)

“I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist!”

“I think finishing the books, it’s definitely been a release. I feel more relaxed. I thought, I can come here now and crash and burn. What does it matter?” (Jonathan Ross)

“I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

“I would definitely see what Harry sees. I would have seen my mother. I would have been able to talk to my mother. Definitely [my] mum dying had a profound influence on the books because I had been writing about Harry for six months when she died. In the first draft his parents were disposed of in almost a cavalier fashion. Six months in and my mother dies, and I really think from that moment on death became a central, if not the central, theme of the seven books.” (Today)

“I’ll be writing until I can’t write anymore. It’s a compulsion with me. I love writing.” (GoodReads)

“I’m a female writer and what’s interesting about the wizarding world is that when you take strength out of the equation, a woman can fight just the same as a man can fight.” (The Women of Harry Potter)

“I’ve no idea where ideas come from and I hope I never find out; it would spoil the excitement for me if it turned out I just have a funny little wrinkle on the surface of my brain which makes me think about invisible train platforms.” (Amazon.co.uk)

“If it’s a good book, anyone will read it. I’m totally unashamed about still reading things I loved in my childhood.” (Time)

“Is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

“It was a bereavement. It was huge. Although I knew it was coming, we all know that the people we love are mortal, we all know we’re mortal, we know it’s going to end; you can’t prepare yourself for it. So even though I always knew it would be seven books, that was it, I knew how it was going to end, and when it ended I was in a slight state of shock.” (Oprah)

“It was simultaneously terrifying and one of the most wonderful things I’ve done in my life. It was wonderful. The British aren’t very good at celebrating themselves. We have quite a complex view of ourselves, I think. And that was one evening where we got it right, and we celebrated being British in a way that we all felt comfortable with.” (CBS News)

“My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.” (New York Times)

“My youngest child asked me the other day, ‘Mummy, if you had to choose between us and writing, what would you choose?’ And I said, ‘Well I would choose you but I would be very, very grumpy.’” (Waterstones)

“Of course one could be cynical and say it was a marketing ploy, but I don’t want the kids to know what’s coming because that’s part of the excitement of the story. I’ve sweated blood creating all my red herrings and lay all my clues.” (Newsnight)

“Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all — in which case, you fail by default.”

“The best of us must sometimes eat our words.”

“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. My fantasy of being a famous writer—and again, there is a slight disconnect with reality, which happens a lot with me—I imagined being a famous writer would be like being Jane Austen. You’d be able to sit at home in your parsonage and your books would be very famous. Occasionally you’d correspond with the Prince of Wales’ secretary.” (Newsnight)

“The only way out is through.”

“The worst that can happen is that everyone says, ‘That’s shockingly bad.”
“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

“There’s always room for a story that can transport people to another place.”

“There’s always trepidation. I think people might be surprised to know I felt trepidation every time I produced a Potter book. The weight of expectation there was … I won’t say crushing … but it was extraordinary and wonderful to have that weight of expectation, but at times … with the expectations literally of millions of fans, all of whom were very invested in the story and wanted to see what they wanted to see. And I knew where I was going. I had to put on mental blinkers a lot, and just think, ‘I know where I am going. I must not be influenced by this.” (Charlie Rose)

“There’s nothing better when something comes and hits you and you think ‘YES’!”

“This may surprise people, but in many, many ways Hufflepuff is my favorite house.” (Scholastic Inc.)

“Those are the indulgences you can have before you have children. Now I don’t have time to obsess. All that stuff about, ‘I need to go this certain way and do that’ was an indulgence of my youth.” (The Guardian)

“Those who write for children, or at least those who write best for children, are not childlike or immature, but they do remember with sometimes painful intensity both what it was to be small and confused and how wonderful was that fierce joy in the moment that can become so elusive in later life.” (The Eternal Bookshelf)

“Three, six, and seven have been the best to write. That’s Azkaban, the Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows.” (Wit Beyond Measure)

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.”

“Whatever money you might have, self-worth really lies in finding out what you do best.” (Mugglenet.com)

“Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

“I feel I really became myself here, in that everything was stripped away, I’d made such a mess of things. But that was freeing, so I just thought, ‘Well, I want to write’, and I wrote the book and what is the worst than can happen? It gets turned down by every publisher in Britain, big deal.” (The Telegraph)

“I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.”

“I think the single biggest thing that money gave me — and obviously I came from a place where I was a single mother, and it really was hand to mouth at one point. It was literally as poor as you can get in Britain without being homeless at one point. If you’ve ever been there you will never, ever take for granted that you don’t need to worry. Never.'”

“I wish you all very good lives.”

“I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny — a thousand things before ‘thin.’ And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.'”

“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

“It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

“Personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a checklist of acquisition. Your qualifications are not your life.'”

“Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression; it meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised by fools.'”

“The truth is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with caution.”

“There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”

“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

“You place too much importance… on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”

“You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”